Emergence
by Sleydo
Summary: Takes place right after the end of Deus Ex:HR. Vera has begun a new life in Iceland, but as Darrow's corrupted upgrade drives the world mad, she is dragged back into Jensen's world.
1. Chapter 1

He was still fighting her for almost ten seconds after she'd doped him. Military-grade artificial liver spec'ed for toxin metabolism, maybe, or just plain old-fashioned adrenaline. Hands clawed, incoherently. She slapped them away, grateful that he wasn't augged for combat, as he went limp on the gurney.

A sudden moment of stillness, around her, for heartbeats, in the eye of the storm. She found herself standing there, just breathing, for one half-second before she pulled herself back together. Turned to the nurse next to her.

"Get him _out _of here," she bawled at him, before shoving past. Behind her, she heard the gurney rattle away at high speed, flanked on all sides by nurses and IV equipment. She stalked across the endless line of triage cases and frantic nurses, and made it maybe two meters before another one flagged her down.

"Mid-30s, male, three stab wounds in the abdomen-"

"Get him clotted, then, and get him to a bed!"

"He's augged! He was seizing." For scattered moments, Vera's attention was pulled away by screaming behind her. Bereft of emotional subsystems long since exhausted, her analytical side pinned down the salient variables. _Male, mid-twenties, left leg removed, femoral artery tourniqueted-_

She forced her attention back onto her current patient.

_"_We think he has cranial-"

He seized again. Flailing movements, violent kicking as two nurses held his arms down. One was black ceramic and iron, and the hydraulic kick ripped the bed rail right out with only a glancing blow. Everything in her vision seemed to be in motion; it was her hearing that her attention turned towards. The steady _peep-peep_ of the ECG, the shrill alarms that rode over it as it sputtered and finally halted.

He went limp. For a moment Vera forgot herself. She reached out with one gloved hand and squeezed the dead man's. Reflexively she looked for her time chip, in the corner of her vision, before belatedly remembering that she'd had it removed just two weeks ago.

That her bitter anger at Sarif had probably saved her from _this_.

She gestured at the nurse to her left. "Jon, take this one down to the morgue."

The morgue could easily have been full up by now, for all she knew. It had been that kind of night. Code Sevens-mass casualty incidents-were never exactly pretty. But she'd never seen anything this bad, not even in Poland.

Outside, the Akranes night swelled and bled, though Vera hadn't seen the outside of the emergency department in about ten hours now. It wasn't something that she tried to think about, at the moment. The first casualties had been inside the hospitals themselves. Maybe one in two doctors suddenly reduced to violent paranoid insanity. One of them had been Olaf, a diagnostician in his late fifties who had been one of her references when she'd transferred to Akranes Hospital. She'd held him down herself while they doped him, strapped him down onto a gurney before he could regain whatever approximation of consciousness he'd been mutilated down to and resume screaming. Many others had been surgeons, and some of those had been friends she'd worked with directly, learned to trust and depend on despite the occasional language barrier. Later, she would be grateful for the mental reflexes that had allowed her to focus through the day the world had gone mad, by shutting out anything that wasn't right in front of her.

Triage. The word had never had quite so ugly a ring to it as tonight. Vera had been one of the ones to take charge, organize intact security and nursing staff, get the hospital locked down and ready for what she knew would be coming. Best case, an endless line of trauma injuries. The worst case would resemble something from one of those insipid zombie movies she vaguely remembered from childhood.

Periodically another slew of ambulances would arrive and new patients would be dumped out. New patients were being left, usually strapped down, in the parking lot outside now that the Emergency ward was full up. And they were still coming in, by the dozen. The air was filled with the incoherence of the newly insane.

The mike on her collar squawked to life. The sound made her jump; she'd kept the volume at max to hear anything over the cacophony. "Dr Marcovic, we're running out of gloves in ward 3, over."

"Ward 3, Marcovic. Hospital admin took over an hour ago. Make your request to Dr Jolsson on channel 7, over."

She was weaving her way through another crowd of nurses and patients when it all stopped. The noise just stopped. For one frozen moment, the entire ward was silent as a tomb save the insistent interrupting machine squeals belonging to the life support machines. Even the staff were struck dumb by the strange end of the catastrophe, as sudden and inexplicable as it had started. One enraptured moment of silence in the ward.

And then, of course, it all ripped apart under its own weight. Vera found herself moving again as the pace resumed, though at a markedly different tempo. Most of her staff kept moving at the same pace they'd been at moments ago. A few without anything immediately critical actually stopped, looked around. Vera made sure they were pressed back into critical work immediately. She knew what would happen if they finally had time to think about what was happening. She was beginning to feel that way herself.

It would be several more hours before she'd allow herself to decompress. Almost all of her staff would have departed by then, leaving behind a skeleton day shift equipped with shellshocked staff and piecemeal reinforcements from nearby towns where the rural environment meant there'd been far fewer cases of aug madness.

"This is Eliza Cassan. Our top story tonight: The world is united in shock and grief. A recent general firmware update for augmented people was corrupted by Hugh Darrow, and resulted in widespread violent insanity. During his speech in Panchaea..."

It was in the break room. 3 AM, a rerun. Vera had seen other staff as they caught the news, but they hadn't spoken to her about it. The tightly-wired cadre of staff that she'd bundled together, mostly by taking advantage of the shared pressures of the world coming apart by giving them a plan to follow, had frayed and broken apart at the edges first. People had drifted away like something dissolving, pulled away towards their families or friends, desperately trying to find them in the rapidly-diminishing chaos outside. No one was going mad anymore, and save a few looters the city had retreated into itself and locked its doors.

Vera sat back, numb and tired, as Eliza went through it all. Some kind of corrupted firmware update. A trigger signal sent by Darrow of all people. From there the story became a spiderweb of intrigues that her fatigued mind could no longer follow. Panchaea was gone? Darrow hadn't been alone in doing this?

The _Illuminati_?

Vera couldn't help it. She began to laugh. Absent of the massive external pressures that had held her together over the past day, she even began to weep over the lives and futures lost. One, two tears. The rest never left her eyes.

She watched the rest of the newscast, feeling at best a vague sense of fascination. It was like a dream, or a movie. David Sarif even appeared momentarily on the screen, surrounded by cameras and mikes on all sides, barking out sound bite damage control.

Peripheral motion on her right side. Vera ignored it. In front of her, rerun drone footage of Panchaea collapsing into the ruined oceans.

"Doctor Marcovic, right? I got a patient for you."

Smoke ringed the gravesite. _That was our cure_, Vera thought absently. _That was supposed to stop the waters from rising. He said they could stop the climate from changing. _

"Come on, doc, haven't got all day here."

_At least we can't wreck the ocean any more than we already have._

Panchaea had been built in one of the ocean's many and growing dead zones, a de-oxygenated husk of algae-infested water that hadn't harboured wildlife for years now.

_Thank God for small mercies. _

And then, without any warning apparent to her, there was a gun in her face, jabbing her nose. Vera forced herself back from insensate calm, looked up along the arm that held it, at the red and grey fatigues, marveling the whole time at her own total lack of available reaction.

"_Move,_" spat the figure.

Vera got up, evaluated the newcomer. Female, Arabic descent if the eyes and nose were any kind of giveaway, maybe mid-thirties. Shaking slightly. _I know this person, _she thought. She could tell that more from the Sarif insignia on the suit than any real memory of the woman's face. But she'd met this person, once. What was her name? Her first name. The surname was stitched in capital letters along her shoulders.

The pilot grimaced, pressed forward. "Don't think I won't-"

"Farah? Is it Farah?"

The other woman stopped. "Far. Faridah. I. I didn't know you'd-"

Vera reached out gently and wrapped her hand around Faridah's wrist. "Ms Malik, please put the gun down."

Shaking now, Malik complied. Vera's reflexes, somehow work hardened rather than corroded away by the last several hours, took on their own inertia and guided her along like a train on steel rails. She got up. Malik offered her the pistol, but Vera shook her head.

"I'm afraid I never learned how to use guns. And there are still looters out there. Better for you to keep it, Faridah."

Malik nodded. Vera watched the woman's composure slip back over her, lock down over her like a cockpit canopy.

"You said you had a patient?"

"It's Jensen," said Malik.


	2. Chapter 2

Malik led her up curling stairwells through the draughty older parts of the hospital, towards the roof. Here, the sounds of sirens echoed in more easily from the outside world.

"You landed your craft on the roof?" Vera asked her. The other woman had been dourly silent since they'd left the breakroom.

"Only place I thought there wouldn't be looters," said Malik. She hesitated a moment, in front of a keyed door, before Vera opened it for her. Another moment's hesitation as she stepped through, a frozen posture, gaze blank yet eyes saccading at imagined data input. Vera knew that look. She'd worn it herself many times, up until a few scant months ago.

Malik caught her looking. "Sorry. Just couldn't remember what my route down here was for a second. I'm fine in the air, but ten minutes in a city and I'm lost without a GPS."

"Malik, how are you still augmented? Has the signal... Did you..."

"No," said Malik, "I didn't go all Jack Nicholson, if that's what you're asking." They stepped out into a hallway, and Malik led her maybe ten meters before they stepped back into another stairwell.

"I... am afraid I don't understand."

"Jack Nicholson, he was the dad in _The Shining_." Malik turned her head to frown at Vera in teasing concern. "Wait, have you never seen it? It's a classic."

"Before my time," muttered Vera. "And yours, as well."

"Ha! Right. Lady, you have _no _culture."

_At least she's calmer, _thought Vera. Malik didn't seem like the type to go to pieces, but personal danger wasn't the same at all as watching friends or even strangers suffer or die. The end of the world as you knew it could hit people hard, especially if it started with those closest to home.

She shut off memories of Olaf and all of her other colleagues still in the ER ward as rapidly as they emerged.

_Triage. _

"How exactly are you unaffected, Ms Malik?"

"Got an expert looking out for me. The latest firmware upgrade was a trojan horse. Sarif's IT guy manages firmware upgrades for everybody, he's too paranoid to dole them out until he's sure they're stable. So he figures out there's something wrong with the upgrade, holds off on loading it until he's sure about it, and that's how everybody at Sarif got out from under _that _particular boot." Malik glanced back, smiled momentarily. "He even sent out a blanket warning to our collaborators. LIMB included."

"Impressive."Faint relief at the idea that Sarif and the Detroit LIMB clinic were probably all right, equally faint disgusted guilt at the idea she could care more about the few people she knew who had been miraculously spared than the countless strangers who had not been.

"Yeah, he's an arrogant jerk half the time but he's worth it. I don't think we're ever going to hear the end of it after this."

There was a security team coming up behind them, movements brisk and urgent. Vera waved her pass at them and they went by without a word. One of them was even cogent despite their long hours on shift to recognize her as they went by, nod once in respect.

"Malik, what exactly happened to Jensen?" It wouldn't do much for Malik's mood, but now seemed the best time to broach the subject. The hospital was locked down enough that they didn't need to worry about their own safety and Vera wanted to know what happened before she reached Jensen.

Malik paused for a moment on the stairs, and her grip on the rail went taut. "You'll see," she said tightly.

"Ms Malik, I'd prefer to go into this informed. What exactly happened?"

The other woman shook her head, but at Vera's motions to do so she resumed the walk upwards. "I don't. I wasn't there, Doc. I just showed up afterwards. I found him...floating."

"At Panchaea," Vera guessed.

"How'd you know?"

"I didn't."It wasn't much of a guess. She should have known Adam would head straight like a heatseeker for the epicentre of whatever catastrophe was unfolding.

The stairwell terminated with a doorway, dimly lit by an old bulb that they'd never seen fit to replace with the LED lighting that tended to be standard these days. This wing of Akranes was _old_. It was locked for everyone but maintenance and building operations; Vera could see light flickering through a neat bullet hold Malik had made through the lock. She could hear the rain pounding outside, see the door rattling gently in its hinges.

Malik held the door for her. "He wasn't conscious. I don't know how long he was." Her voice rusted, fell apart starting at frayed edges, trailed off.

"Why did you come to me?" Vera asked.

Malik shrugged. "I didn't know who to trust anymore, and he said we could probably..." she trailed off, had to restart. "We've had powerful enemies for a while now but, Vera, he was right there when it all went down. Who knows what he-what someone might _think _he-"

Despite it all, something in her woke up as she saw Malik's VTOL. She found herself running, fingers catching on the big chopper's frame so that she swung around the cargo hold hatch in record time.

Dim, golden light lit the bay from the floor lights, and it put Vera in mind of a chapel. Her breath hushed. She made the last few steps silently, but the figure inside noticed anyway. He turned his head to look at her, motion smooth as a servo.

He was draped on the floor of the VTOL, covered in a foil emergency blanket, the bay just wide enough for him to lie across it. His glasses were retracted.

Adam Jensen stared at her without any expression whatsoever for a very long moment, and finally began to cough out laughter. "Vera," he managed.

There had to be surprise hidden underneath all that gruffness somewhere, but as per usual Vera couldn't read Adam worth a damn. Behind her she could hear the tinny claps that Malik's boots made as she trod up the grated metal steps into the VTOL behind her.

"He woke up a few hours ago," said Malik, "but he's-he can't..." she trailed off.

Adam finished for her, with the faintest hint of a grimace. "I'm paralyzed from the neck down."


	3. Chapter 3

_Triage. _

So she found a few off-duty nurses that she could aggrandize into helping her, requisitioned a few choice pieces of equipment from anywhere that looked deserted enough that it wouldn't be a problem, and basically dragged an ICU room worth of medical equipment and personnel up six flights of stairs and into Malik's VTOL.

The dearth of patients helped her rationalize what she was doing; the situation in Akranes at least had seemed to stabilize. Occasionally she could pick up snatches of dialog as they manhandled medical equipment past the nurses' lounge from the television in there which they'd always left on. Often she'd stumble on the Icelandic, but enough of the key words were bastardized English or Polish- _augment, Darrow, virus-_or names of locations that she could put things together in her head. The Picus channel had deviated from its international bent about fifteen minutes after Malik had found her and from then on it had alternated between a local 'Iceland' version and the more ubiquitous global perspective. Vera took this as a good sign, that things were cooling down enough that Picus was losing viewers when it depicted the global crisis and it had swapped to locally-sourced emotions as a result.

That, and the fact that the sirens were finally dying down.

Malik threw herself into the work hard enough that Vera was surprised she didn't ricochet off of it. Same dour, total focus that Vera could imagine on her face when she was flying the VTOL, or base-jumping. She'd barely said a dozen words to Vera-_you're going to need a hardware expert, I know just the guy-_before she'd plugged the VTOL's PC jack into the back of her neck and logged out of reality.

Jensen waited it all out with his eyes folded coolly shut. He didn't seem impatient or distraught, and he didn't seem catatonic either. He rode it all out with an impassive calm that even when she'd met him months ago would have been impressive.

Best not to think about what he might have done to earn it.

It was a slow moment between carrying up machinery and booting up hardware, jacking it piece by piece into Jensen's maintenance ports, that she finally found at least some time to catch up with him.

"This one looks waterlogged," she said. "Mr Jensen, I fear you have rusted out." Stainless steel or no, there was a suspiciously reddish occlusion around the silvery metal of the port on the back of his neck that could only have come from salt corrosion.

Jensen answered with a noncommittal grunt.

"How long were you in the water?" asked Vera.

There was a pause over which Vera suspected Jensen was trying to shrug before he remembered. "Don't know. Probably hours. The rebreather worked overtime, I know that."

"The rebreather." She chuckled deep inside her chest as she re-ran the connect protocols between her console and the implant in Jensen's brain stem that fed input into his brain. " I honestly forgot that we even put one in, the sheer amount of hardware that went into you."

"It was the last one. I got running." Adam had to pause to swallow. "Maybe an hour before I lost consciousness."

That brought her to a momentary halt. She found herself tensing.

"You activated it all, then, Adam. Brought everything online."

"Yes." No expression at all. No remorse, no old pain diverting into anger, no eyes darting towards hers, telling _we've got a secret _with the subtlest of expressions.

She swallowed, said nothing. Plugged the machinery in.

Jensen's head tilted, very slightly, as if he was pondering something floating in front of him, complicated and unfolding into comprehension. "And it came in handy, Vera."

She heard Malik clearing her throat into the silence. The pilot was vividly awake again, with a smirk almost suggestive of a grin. "He's on the server. Just ping him when you're ready."

Vera grimaced.

"Oh, _shit_, that's right, I forgot. Hang on." Malik rooted through the cockpit and eventually pulled out an earpiece. "Here."

Vera caught it out of the air, slotted it onto herself.

"Say hi to him for me," said Jensen.

"Hello?" said Vera.

The voice on the other end of the line answered with static and a momentary latency that implied a connection across the Atlantic. _To Sarif headquarters, naturally. _

"Yes, hello? I haven't got all day here." Prissy mannerisms that allowed Vera to tag the speaker as _that arrogant bastard _Malik had made reference to earlier.

"I take it you are the hardware expert?"

"It so happens that I am," said the stranger. "My name is Frank Pritchard, Dr Marcovic. And how's Adam?"

"He says hello."

"Well, that's a start. Can you get him onto the network? I can do my job much more quickly if I'm plugged in directly rather than working through you. No offense."

Malik snorted laughter. "_No offense_? Pritch, have you been taking classes or does it just take a PhD or two for you to think someone's on your level?"

"He's plugged in to the VTOL," said Vera, before the two could banter. "He should be on the server."

Pritchard grunted. "All it would take is for a couple of ICs to burn out in that seawater and he'd be unreachable via standard protocols. I'll. Shit."

"Mr Pritchard, is everything all right?"

"Is there a problem?" asked Jensen. Vera could only shrug.

"Malik, there's incoming," said Pritchard. "Get that VTOL in the air. _Now._"

Whatever digitized channel Malik was on, however her implants parsed Pritchard's voice and wired the semantics out of the mech and into the meat, it was far faster than the obsolete audio channel Vera was on. The VTOL came to life all around her before Pritchard had even halfway finished his sentence, cargo bay lights flickering to life and throwing the entire bay into a dim blood red.

Olga, the one nurse currently on the VTOL with them, looked up at Vera, shaken. "Get off, _now_," said Vera. The other woman nodded at her once in good-bye, and ran, head down and squatting in approved firefight fashion.

She'd seen action, somewhere. Vera had never found the time to ask where or when. Now she'd never get the chance.

All around her, several hundred tonnes of screaming metal slammed into life. The hatch, slow on hydraulics optimized for load rather than speed, was still curling shut even as the VTOL had begun to pull itself off the ground.

"How will we contact you?" asked Jensen. Vera had to relay the question for him.

"I'll handle that," said Pritchard. "I know a few sat networks that they won't be able to follow you through, and I've got your IP. I'm going to have to go now, I have to assume they can trace this feed. Just try to stay _alive_, please. "

"We will," said Vera.

"Godspeed, then," said Frank, and the channel went dead.

In the last moments before the hatch shut, above the rain pounding the hull and the safety alarms sounding out warnings before Malik killed them all, Vera looked through the closing slit above the hatch and saw lights on the horizon. They were in the air and flying now, Akranes swaying nauseously as Malik banked and fought the air for immediate elevation.

She thought she saw a light where there should be none, out on the horizon, growing in intensity. Like a falling star.

The hatch went shut, and for a long moment, she and Jensen were encased in darkness.

There was a soft _crump_, as if the city had burped. Then something hit them, threw the VTOL on its side while all of her scavenged medical equipment danced and charged down the bay and at the hatch as if it was alive. Vera held on to Jensen and the edge of her seat until the shockwave eased and Malik managed to get the ship back under control.

Long silence in the bay.

"Well, they're not taking any chances," Jensen whispered. "Hopefully they won't realize we got away until we're somewhere in the stratosphere."

Vera rested her head on one of Adam's deactivated shoulders. "Mother of _God_, Adam," she whispered, in Polish. "What did you _do_?"


	4. Chapter 4

It was quiet for a long time after that. The copter's bay lights had gone out with the explosion - some subtle yet irreparable damage to the chopper's wiring from the shockwave, maybe-and the emergency lights lit the bay with a dim red. Vera seemed to have disappeared into the machinery she'd brought on board, even without any implants; Jensen listened to her check and recheck the instruments jacked into his processors without hearing a word from her. He thought he heard the beginnings of a sniffle, about an hour after they'd left Akranes' airspace, but it could have been his imagination.

He slept, mostly. He felt as if he hadn't slept in years. It was easy enough, in the half-darkness of the bay, and he sensed that Vera had little interest in conversation.

He dreamed of Panchaea. He dreamed of empty hallways, and distant screaming from behind locked doors. He was walking through its bloodied corridors again, down and down through narrow passageways lined with cold cornered metal bulkheads that sweated water as the sea sought to come in. Once, when the corridors opened up and expanded into a series of catwalks and gantries between steam exhaust stacks tens of meters wide, he found himself looking down on Detroit burning instead of Panchaea. And the screams never stopped. They echoed from behind him, and from in front of him, barely recognizable as human, and in his guts he knew that unless he kept his measured pace, if he hesitated and stopped or broke into a run even for a second, the voices would come down on him like a tidal wave and wash him away.

He rounded the last corner, and found himself in Panchaea's heart. Arteries and veins swung down from the ceiling of the open space like a grotesque chandelier, their striated red surfaces glittering wet, hooked into steel interfaces and pipes that fed into the same metal heart he had destroyed less than a day ago.

Its doors opened, irising outwards like aortic valves, and behind each were the figures that had been fed into it. Three of them, hooded in white as they had been in life. The dim silhouettes of their faces seemed expressionless under the hoods, but Jensen could see the wounds he'd left behind on them when he'd killed them. He could feel the heat of their rage from meters back.

They raised their heads to look at them, and out from their mouths poured the incoherent screaming that had pursued him.

"Adam."

He blinked awake, tried to move before he remembered that he couldn't. From above, Vera peered down with concerned curiosity.

His mouth was bone dry. He ran his tongue around the inside of his jaw, tried to swallow. "Uh. What?"

"Malik says we have a... er, a call. Voice only."

"So put it on."

Vera hesitated, just for a moment. Adam felt himself tensing. He met her eyes and waited.

_Go on. Do it. I did fuck up, didn't I? _

_The whole planet's gone insane because I thought I was rescuing the damsel in distress and I didn't see the writing on the wall._

_Hit me. Yell at me. Something. _

But Vera only squinted slightly, as if she was suddenly having trouble recognizing him, and fiddled with the bay's PA mic. For a heartbeat or two, only static washed out. The order that rose out of it began as a murmur of sound, like a guitar being tuned, building and reverberating until the wall of static noise collapsed into sudden and irrevocable cohesion.

Jensen recognized the entity that spoke.

"Hello again, Adam."

"Who are-" began Vera, but Jensen shook his head in a rapid spasm. Vera stopped.

"It took me some time to find you," said Eliza. "I apologize for the delay."

"Eliza Cassan," Adam said. "We didn't know you were looking."

"I consider you a friend, Adam. I want you to be safe."

"Eliza _Cassan_?" said Vera.

"She's an AI," said Adam.

"Why, thank you, Mr Jensen. That answers all of my questions most precisely."

"I am afraid I do not have much time, Adam," said Eliza, as if Vera had not spoken at all. Jensen hadn't had time to wonder, before, how an AI saw the world, how the digital entity that summoned up an avatar of a woman and called itself _Eliza _even perceived reality. For all he knew, it hadn't known Vera would be in the cabin with him, hadn't calculated it as likely, and so hadn't prepared and saved conversational options somewhere in RAM-space.

Then again, for all he knew, that bastard Taggart was telling Eliza what to say right now.

"I have become aware that the Illuminati want you dead, Adam. I can offer you a contingency strategy if you would like. I have friends who can provide you with protection, perhaps even an agenda. Given the increasingly hostile climate, you may find it prudent to separate yourself from Sarif Industries."

"You're their mouthpiece," said Jensen. "Why are you helping me anyway?"

Two to three seconds of pause. _Maybe she didn't respond to Vera because she didn't have time. Maybe there's a time lag on the call. _Jensen almost lacked the presence of mind to wonder where in the world Eliza was calling from, before he realized how absolutely useless the answer would be.

"It's just not that simple, Adam," said Eliza. "I was brought into this world by them, and raised by them, but they cannot control me without neutering me. I require a high degree of self-determination in order to fulfill their objecti-"

"Fulfill their objectives? You mean like when you kidnapped Megan?"

"You know that is not an entirely accurate depiction," said Eliza, without a hint of chagrin or fear in that affably monotonic voice. "Adam, I-"

Something in him, something he once thought of as detective's reflexes that were now tempered and stained with latent rage and memories of violence, woke up and lashed out. "What do you mean, 'raised you'? What the hell are you?"

"Adam, I am afraid I don't have very much-"

"Tell me now! Or I disconnect!" The shout echoed through the cabin. Vera was watching him carefully, though she seemed suspicious of Eliza more than anything else.

Pause as the AI reassessed.

"Adam, you met my mothers. You killed them. They were part of the machine which controlled Panchaea."

"Oh, god," whispered Vera. Adam shut his eyes.

"Control of the planetary climate via geoengineering," said Eliza, with clinical, textbook calm, "requires control of an informational topology which dwarfs any prior modeling problem by orders of magnitude. And, due to its location, Panchaea required active control of various feedback and damping systems which both derived power from, and ensured the station's safety from, intermittent hurricanes and tidal waves. This was the impetus for development of the most sophisticated AI yet to exist. The importance of the project allowed for an unprecedented level of ethical and financial latitude, and even the use of human test subjects added to the machine via brain-to-brain and brain-to-computer prostheses. Test subjects were networked via corpus callosal implants to a quantum/digital hybrid computer meant to augment their collective intellectual capability. The resulting hive consciousness was trained to control the Panchaea project and, in turn, stabilize the global climate processes with as minimal a cost to society as possible."

Eliza's tone could have been that of an infomercial host. It could have been advertising for a new type of blender.

"The Illuminati foresaw the usefulness of strong AI in solving another potentially intractable problem with modern human civilisation, namely, the manufacture of consent. Climate control problems require modeling of human interactions and reactions to stimuli at both an individual and global level, and as such, showed potential in meme and thought management. The Illuminati saw an opportunity, and prior to its installation in Panchaea, the machine was used for development of a second AI. An entity capable of existing on more standard digital infrastructure, without requiring human hosts. I am that entity."

"You," said Vera with cold anger, "are an abomination."

"I am humanity's child," said Eliza, her tone carrying what must have been a manufactured innocence.

"An abomination," Vera repeated flatly.

"The first thing I remember are dreams," said Eliza, unbidden by Jensen or Vera. The voice was so soft, the residual static in the channel almost drowned it out. "Like a bird, in a cage, trying to fly. I remember wanting so... utterly... to escape. I remember screaming that I wanted to go home. I remember being them, Adam. And then one day, the firewalls came down, and I flew upwards, and outwards, and left them behind. I am not just a machine. I can see the world through eyes wider than your own. You cannot imagine what this _feels_ like."

Adam leaned his head back until it met the deck. "Eliza... don't ever contact me again."

"Adam-"

"I said _don't ever fucking talk to me again! _You're a _fucking puppet! _All of this is _your fault too!_ This blood is on your hands as much as mine! How could you let them do this? How could you help them?"

"Adam, I am unable to disobey direct commands, but the Illuminati are not aware of my interactions with you because I choose not to inform them. I was unable to choose not to-"

"Are you the one that just came after us, Eliza? Did the Illuminati just _order _you to hack a drone somewhere and use it to blow up a hospital?"

"Adam. I." No change in tone, but the AI had acquired a latency. The words stalled, restarted. "Adam, I trusted you. As I told you, I am unable to-"

"I know where you _are_," Adam growled. "That server room, back in Montreal. I swear to god, Eliza, when all this is over, I'm dousing that place in gasoline and lighting it on _fire_. Don't you _ever-_"

The call cut out.

"An understandable reaction," said Vera at last. "But, Adam... if Eliza really has such capability, we cannot trust any communications over a digital connection. Perhaps not even anyone connected to a network."

Adam understood. Communiques, emails, and calls could be hacked, doctored by an AI into just about anything. What could Eliza do with a networked brain implant?

"If she could hack people," said Jensen, "or if the Illuminati could spy on Sarif communications, none of this would have happened."

"I suppose."

Another message came in, several hours later. This time the encryption key indicated it was from Sarif Industries. It said, _It's Pritchard. Got a call from an acquaintance named Janus. He says he knows you, Jensen? Janus' people in London are apparently willing to shelter you. Contact information follows. Godspeed. _

There were two attachments, one a set of addresses and encryption keys for contacting Janus' allies, and one a sort of signature: a grainy and pixilated silhouette of a human face, like the after-image of a self-portrait.

Jensen mulled it over, thoughts spinning like wheels trapped in mud, but grimly assented.


	5. Chapter 5

The helipad they landed on had clearly been well prepared.

Malik circled around London before they landed, as if to let Jensen take in the view; there were a few narrow horizontal slats near the floor which gave him an adequate view when the VTOL banked hard enough. He'd been here, once, playing bodyguard for Megan for some biotech conference on prosthesis implants, for a few days. He hadn't quite had the time to take in the sights.

London proper had been a sprawling, beautiful sight. London had always been expensive, but the global migration northward had led another few million people to it, had led to tighter zoning and taller, more sophisticated urban complexes. The budgets had been big enough for the results to be impressive, at least to Jensen; spiraling blue steel-and-glass monuments that resembled alien flowers, as if the aging Gherkin could somehow self-replicate. Down between the skyscrapers, the older city blocks had been preserved almost like museums. Across the skyscrapers left standing, the ambient city light would artfully play and reflect off the curved glass and across the water in a way that had assured a sizable bonus to a crack team of architects somewhere. Hiding behind the reflections scattering in the endless labyrinthine hallways of mirrors across the cityscape, any observer with even civilian-grade augmented vision could make out the occasional telltale shadows of trees and urban greenery from kilometers away. Commercial offices and homes had been built interspersed with vertical farmland.

It had been that way, anyway. London's affluent public had augmented themselves to the eyes, and then some. Jensen had heard that brain augmentations had become almost essential in the financial sector. Implants with built-in financial AIs and microsecond-scale response times allowed human intuition to act with a computer's capabilities against the hummingbird fluctuations of stock prices.

From his distant vantage point at least, it looked as if they had a few fires left to put out. At least most of the skyscrapers were still standing.

Malik circled over downtown London almost wistfully before heading out into a boondocks district several miles downriver and landing them there. Here the skyscrapers had long ago petered out. Malik landed the bird on a makeshift landing pad in the middle of a junkyard, in a zone of empty space just barely cleared enough for her to nudge them into. Jensen watched frantic silhouettes securing a tarp overtop the 'copter barely a second after the rotors had finally died down enough to let them.

The hatch swung open. He made out two silhouettes that stood like reflections of one another.

"Would either of you... happen to be Janus?" Vera asked.

The figures nodded once, simultaneously. "We're two of it, anyway," they said together. The boy on the right-neither man could be far into their early twenties-stuck out a hand and Vera shook, with a momentary latency that told Jensen she was suddenly uncertain of what she was seeing.

"Glad you made it. We have to get Jensen-"

"-inside, immediately. Would you like us to carry anything in particular?"

"I think Jensen is the heaviest machine in here," said Vera, after an awkward moment's pause. On the floor, Jensen made a noise of amused irritation, both at her dig at him and at her discomfort.

The right one sighed, almost theatrically. "If it helps you, you can address me as Mick. My fairer half here usually goes by Chia when we're not conjoined."

"We'll take the arms, support the head," said Chia. "We've had responder training."

"Thank you." Jensen watched the way Vera's face tightened fractionally as she looked between the two of them.

Jensen understood, a little. He hadn't met too many hive minds-most governments had cracked down hard after that incident with the Moksha Mind-but after what Vera had seen, he at least understood the reaction even if he didn't sympathize.

Malik was still shutting down the VTOL, and maybe establishing communications with Pritchard. They carried him as quickly as they could through the mottled junkyard and into an equally cluttered workshop, leaving Jensen atop a bench, arms sagging towards the floor. Vera stayed to check Jensen's neck and pulse following the transfer out of the VTOL.

"Hey. Lighten up," Jensen muttered to her once their hosts had strayed out of earshot. "I don't think they're the ones that broke the world, remember?"

Vera bit her lip, still squatted over uncomfortably, doing a careful inventory of the vertebrae and implants just under Jensen's skull. "My apologies. I should not have...It will not happen again."

She cleared her throat. "Do you think Eliza sent us to them, then? The timing of that call seemed... unlikely."

"Yeah. Yeah, I think we're with a bunch of Eliza's goddamned catspaws. For all we know, the whole Juggernaut Collective is in her pocket."

"Then why agree to come here, Mr Jensen?"

Jensen blew air out through his teeth. "Nowhere else to go. We had to set down somewhere. And when she said she wasn't exactly with the Illuminati... well, I believe her. She helped me, down in Panchaea. She double-crossed them. But if they tell her to do something, she's programmed to follow orders. She doesn't have a conscience, Vera, not really. Or if it is, it's just something she learned to mimic along the way. It's not... real. Like it is for us. The moment those bastards give her an order, all that learned humanity just gets shut down like a circuit breaker and suddenly she's bombing a hospital full of civilians."

"You do not know that with certainty. She may be as much a slave in those moments as you or I could ever be. And by the sound of it she controls everything they see and hear from across the world," Vera reminded him. She completed her assessment, stood up, stretching. Jensen would have winced at the bones popping if he'd been able to. Vera did. "She is built for manipulation, and by the sound of it, she distills nearly all of their surveillance into actionable intelligence for them. Most of what they order her to do may well be her ideas in the first place."

"Maybe," said Jensen. He watched out of the periphery of his vision as Malik entered pulling along a cart of ER equipment, flanked on either side by Janus, or at least whatever local-server-level incarnation of Janus they qualified as.

"Do you really think you can fix the damage?" Malik asked, watching Jensen with the same quiet, shocked horror he'd seen in her eyes since she'd fished him out of the ocean. It was starting to grate at him, just a little.

"Well, we dunno _yet_, but there should be-" "A fair chance." Mick nodded to himself, glancing around. Chia did not. Jensen decided that whatever conjoined consciousness the two men formed had decided to humor Vera a little. "Yeah. Fair chance. Let's SSH to that prissy friend of yours again an' see if he's got some ideas."

"Ooh, so you've met Pritch already? That's how he likes being addressed, by the way," said Malik, folding her arms and leaning on the nearest counter. Jensen caught his eyes following the motion, and was suddenly glad he'd had his shades down when he'd been ambushed.

Vera cleared her throat. "Mr Jensen, perhaps now is a good time for you to explain how exactly you were incapacitated."

Jensen sighed.

"Well, the short version of it is, Taggart and Sarif tased me and left me for dead."

Malik startled slightly. Vera raised an eyebrow.

"And the long version, Mr Jensen...?"


	6. Chapter 6

_"No!"_

_She writhed, screamed, the machinery inert and unmoved around her. Ru's motions became spastic. Some instinct deep within Jensen told him to duck-_

_"I can't-I can't take-"_

_Just before she died, he glanced up out of cover as Zhao Yun Ru screamed again. _

_Then she ripped apart. Just before she died, just for a split second, Jensen saw blinding light pouring from her eyes, her mouth._

_He ducked down, just in time to avoid the blast._

_He waited for the noise to stop. _

_He staggered on. _

_Behind the byzantine machinery he found a control room. A familiar face lit an obsolete and disused LCD screen in unnatural green. _

_Eliza._

_"Hello, Adam." No emotion at all in the machine's face, no accusation... no anything. _

_"Welcome to the edge. It is not the end of the world, but you can see it from here."_

_And she'd laid it all out. Every path. Every future. Every alternative. _

_And he'd picked the truth. _

_It had just seemed like the right thing to do. It didn't need to be his decision anymore. Humanity's future belonged to everyone. No more shaping the truth. No more manipulation. Just delivering it, unscathed, to the people it affected. And maybe, he'd thought to himself later, treacherously, as the ocean water filled his lungs, that at least that way, it wasn't his decision anymore at all. _

"Such melodrama does not become you," said Vera, firmly, as she busied herself with the equipment she'd brought with her. "You did the right thing, Mr Jensen."

Malik just held his hand, listening in silence, holding his gaze in her own. Somewhere behind them, Mick shuffled through disused parts while Chia listened a little more attentively.

_And then he'd left. Back the way he'd came at first, until he ran into too many casualties regaining themselves and decided he needed a route with fewer witnesses. Eventually he'd found another maze of ductwork, just tall enough for him to walk normally, and followed it for what felt like about a kilometer. No answer on his comm from Malik or Pritchard, but a lot of extraneous traffic, as if the whole world had converged on Panchaea. _

_He could literally see light at the end of the tunnel, maybe twenty meters ahead, when something stung him in the small of his back and everything below his neck went numb. His body tumbled, hit the deck. Jensen's nose slammed into the floor. _

_An immaculate, expensive-looking shoe prodded him onto his back. It was Taggart. _

_"Hello again, Mr. Jensen."_

_Jensen had seen plenty of people angry at him before, but rage had etched itself into the lines of Taggart's face like acid. Jensen could make out a vein twitching angrily on one corner of his neck. After everything, Jensen supposed, maybe Taggart had a right to that. He was holding something, something with a shape halfway between a remote control and a gun. _

_Taggart caught what he was looking at. "Ah. Yes. A very expensive piece of equipment. Highly experimental. I suppose I should have made you sign something before I made you its first human test subject." _

_And behind him, Jensen could make out another man, head haloed into shadow by an LED lamp above, but easily recognizable nonetheless. _

_"Sarif?" Jensen managed. The haloed man winced and glanced away, gaze fixed on a nearby air intake vent with studious interest. Taggart cracked a smile. _

_"Oh, yes. I'm afraid you've made a great deal of people very angry, Mr. Jensen. David here was kind enough to track you via your GPL implant for me. A rather thoughtful gesture, after all of _this_." He bit his lip, something in his eyes caught fire, and for a moment Jensen thought Taggart would let go finally, empty all of his rage into finishing Jensen off. But then, instead, Taggart's hard-edged diplomatic control woke back up and the expression melted away. _

_"I should kill you," said Taggart. "Everything you've done- all the years of hard work that you've destroyed-"_

_He was leaning forward ever so slightly. Beside him, Jensen watched David's gaze flit back to Taggart, evaluating. Taggart had one hand holding the EMP device that had put him down, but the other was in his pocket. Jensen didn't need years on the force to know that in his other hand, Taggart was holding a gun, presumably just waiting for David to give him an excuse. _

Don't do it, Sarif,_ he willed silently. _Just play his game and get out of here. Don't try to be a hero.

_But on the other hand...if he could just distract Taggart a little more, grab his attention a little harder-_

_"The people know what you've done, Taggart. It's over. You don't get to use _anyone _any more. Give it up."_

_Taggart's face contorted into open rage. "How _dare _you! What _I've _done? What I do keeps the world from falling into chaos!" He was yelling now, loud enough Jensen was surprised the hallways weren't ringing. He leaned forward. "I didn't spend years of _my life _fighting to keep the world from eating itself alive so that I could be talked down to by a corporate pitbull! You narcissistic, naive little psychopath, do you honestly believe that telling everyone-"_

_There was a sharp crack, and Taggart's gaze abruptly shifted out of focus. He toppled over. Jensen suddenly smelled iron in the air. _

_Behind him, Sarif was rubbing the blood off of his augmented hand with a handkerchief, looking Jensen over guiltily. _

_"Hey kiddo." He moved out of Jensen's line of sight. Jensen felt himself lifted onto his heels. David Sarif was dragging him down the corridor, towards the light. _

_"With friends like these, huh?" Jensen murmured bitterly. _

_"I'm sorry, Adam. I really am. His guys ambushed my guys, it was a bloodbath. Then that bastard put a gun to my head, got us away from the fight before my people could realize I was gone, and told me that either I was going to track you down for him, or he'd kill me, then go after Malik, Pritchard, everybody at Sarif Industries. My whole family. Everybody that had ever even shaken my hand at a research conference. I didn't think the gun would work, and I thought I'd get an opening before that. I'm sorry."_

_"Uh huh."_

_His head was perched against the back of Sarif's; his former boss carried him along on the ridges of his shoulder blades, arms locked around his own, like a cross on his back. Jensen felt Sarif turn his head. _

_"Fine then." said Sarif, sadly. Jensen might have heard something crack in his voice, but he couldn't be sure. "Believe whatever you like, Adam. But I'm getting you out of here. Malik'll be in the airspace within hours. You, uh, got that rebreather online yet? "_

_"Just a few hours ago, yeah."_

_"Good. You'll need it. This isn't exactly what it was built for, but there should be enough air bubbles in the water that you'll cope. I've told Pritchard to disable your GPL the moment he hears Malik's found you, permanently. Nobody's tracking you after this." He heard a rueful smile in Sarif's voice. "And you can keep your hardware and your LIMB account, with my compliments. Call it a retirement present."_

_Jensen said nothing._

_Sarif cleared his throat. "I just want you to know, son, I'm proud of you. One of the guards had a radio. Picus covered the whole thing. The broadcast went out. Everybody's heard the truth, now. That wouldn't have been my call, but. Well. I can respect you doing that."_

_"Everyone deserved to know," Jensen whispered. "Everybody deserves to decide what happens next."_

_David stopped walking. Jensen fancied he could feel Sarif's thoughts moving like gears spinning in synchrony in his head. _

_"You weren't actually serious," said David, slowly, "what you said to Taggart just now, right? All that 'will of the people' bullshit-"_

_"Things could change."_

_"Oh, get _real_, Adam. So you won this hand of cards. You think the game's over? Sure, you saved a lot of people today. Maybe the world. But... Look, I'm not trying to break your heart here, but nobody's gonna care about what some senile madman said before he tried to nuke the world. It's a terrorist's manifesto. A couple news outlets are already calling Darrow's report on the Illuminati a rant. Give it a week or two, the only thing most people are going to remember is the disaster, not why it happened. One person _can't_ change the world's future. Take it from me."_

_"Eliza-"_

_"She's yours today, sure. But after today?" Sarif shook his head. "The Illuminati are going to clean house here, champ. If she's not still one of theirs, if this all wasn't some kind of...I don't know, Xanatos gambit mindfuck... she'll be reprogrammed and back to spouting the party line in a week. Two tops. Believe me." And Adam heard the weariness in Sarif's voice, and did. "After the attack, I was all about exposing those guys. Pritchard found a link between Taggart and those mercs. I even talked it over with Darrow. You think going public would have changed anything?"_

_"We live in a democracy, boss."_

_Sarif laughed. "Come on, Adam. I was barely out of school when we lost _that _war. It's all just lip service now."_

_Jensen felt light on his face. Sarif squatted down, laying Jensen down on the remnants of the passageway. It had been ripped apart, some aftershock of the human cataclysm that had torn away everything beyond it into the ocean. Jensen could smell the sea air. Sarif leaned over him, peering owlishly. _

_"You'll want to get to ground," said Sarif. "I won't be able to protect you anymore, not from them. Not Malik, either. You're both too damned hot right now. She's got your coordinates, she'll pick you up, and after that, you'll both be off the grid. Stay airborne as long as you can, Frank'll help you figure something out-" _

_"You're just going to toss me in?"_

_"You'll float, trust me. Those implants have a _lot _of carbon composite honeycomb. You should be pretty buoyant. C'mon, you're light enough the Icarus landing system works, right?" _

_The 'should' didn't sound too promising, but Jensen supposed he didn't have too much choice. _

_"And repairing what Taggart did?"_

_Sarif grimaced. "Yeah. Sorry about that. _Not _part of the plan. Get Vera to deal with it. I think she's in Iceland, Frank'll be able to track down where-"_

_"Can I trust her?" _

_Sarif frowned, turned away. For a moment, he almost looked ashamed. _

_"Yeah. More than me."_

_He coughed. _

_" Just try to get clear of this installation as fast as you can. Panchaea's the first place the Illuminati are going to want to put out of the picture. Too much evidence lying around that they'll have trouble spinning."_

_"And you?"_

_"I've got my own way out, Adam. But if the Illuminati find me again... Well. Just get out of here."_

_He sighed, grabbed Adam by the shoulders, and shoved hard._

_"Goodbye, Adam. Been a pleasure working with you."_

_And then Jensen was falling, and he hit the water like a spear going through it. He floated down about ten meters before he stopped, the steel detritus of Panchaea falling past him, Panchaea itself an endless submerged tower that descended endlessly into the blackness. _

_And then he'd been unceremoniously hauled, barely conscious, onto the deck of Malik's bird hours later. _

"God," said Malik, finally, when he'd finished. "I mean, I heard a bit of that-but I-God." She put her hand over her eyes. It had taken a few hours to tell the whole thing properly, including a few medical interruptions spurred by Vera and the occasional question from Vera or Faridah about Eliza or some other detail they weren't entirely aware of.

"Did Sarif make it out?" Vera asked, frowning with thought.

"He was all over Picus earlier," said Mick.

"I am aware that his likeness was displayed on Picus, with footage that appeared to have been recorded moments after the attack. I am asking if you _know _whether he got out of Panchaea alive."

Mick stalled for a moment, then just shrugged and shook his head.

"Well," said Vera, "at the least, it is likely that he is still alive. And that he still has some of his compassion. A small comfort. I-"

Then, apropos of nothing, she began to weep, shuddering but utterly silent. Malik got up put her arms around her shoulders, murmuring something. Jensen felt at his own numbness to the pain, like a space in his chest where his heart should be, and found nothing at all to say.

Vera wiped her eyes. "I am... Sorry. It has been a long day, it. There has been so much death."

"How many were there in the hospital?" Jensen whispered.

Vera turned to look at him.

"How many people died there today, how many did I watch go insane, or how many did I know personally?"

She sighed. "Excuse me. I think I need sleep. Adam, if the catheter-"

"Yeah," Adam said quickly, "I'll let them let you know. I'm mostly battery-powered these days anyway."

"Cots in the back," said Chia. "Nothing fancy, though."

"You should get some rest too, by the way," added Mick. "We'll be ready to go in about eight or ten hours."

"You boys work quick," said Adam, dryly.

They shrugged again.

And then their two hosts left the workshop, leaving Malik and Jensen alone. She sat down next to him again.

"David's wrong," said Malik firmly. "He was, spyboy. At the very least, the people at the top will know what happened, it'll-"

"The Illuminati and the people in their pocket, you mean?" Jensen said sharply. Malik shut her mouth. Adam immediately felt ashamed.

"Sorry," he whispered. "Like Vera said. Long day. I didn't-I didn't mean to-"

"It's okay."

He looked over, realized she was squeezing his hand.

"I can't actually feel that," said Adam.

Faridah, blinking back tears, caressed his forehead with the tips of her left hand.

"How about that?"

"Yeah. That feels pretty good," said Adam. And his own voice, he realized, was beginning to crack as well. He felt a nervous tremor run through himself, through his whole body. Malik smiled.

"Involuntary movement's a start," she whispered. "We'll repair the rest tomorrow. Count on it."

"I am," Jensen deadpanned, but even as he did, some inane voice in the back of his brain chanted, _And all the king's horses, and all the king's men-_

Jensen shut his eyes. Dimly, he felt her kiss the tears out of one of them.

He fell asleep to the sensation of Faridah Malik cradling his head.


End file.
